The Air-Raid Warden Was a Spy: And Other Tales From Home-Front America in World War II Read Online Free

home-front America was trying to discern the reason for the Pearl Harbor disaster. Radio and press “experts” who had no true facts, gazed into crystal balls and blessed America with their analyses.
    In Iowa, Paul Mallon wrote in the Sioux City Journal: “The Hawaiian attack was obviously a demonstration designed more for psychological effect than for military damage.” A classic example of pure guesswork.
    Other media geniuses stated that the bombing had been done by madmen. “And how can one make sense of the motives of madmen?” it was reasoned.
    Many reporters thought it would have been impossible for Japan to pull off such a gargantuan caper on its own. The Chicago Times declared: “Had it not been for Adolf Hitler, Japan would never have ventured on such a suicide course.”
    That stark declaration would have come as news to the führer. He had been as surprised as U.S. leaders about the bombing. New York PM agreed with the Hitler-ordered-the-attack theory. “The German government is masterminding the Japanese policy,” PM proclaimed.
    The clones in the U.S. media jumped aboard the Hitler-did-it bandwagon. Because of the surprise and daring of the air attack, declared the Tulsa Daily World, “Japan had been carefully coached in such proceedings by the Germans.”
    Columnist Upton Close declared that the Pearl Harbor bombing might have been as big a surprise to Emperor Hirohito and his government as it had been to President Roosevelt and official Washington.
    Billed as a Far East expert, Close elaborated: “It is very possible that there is a double-double-cross in this business. It is possible . . . that this is a coup engineered by the Germans and with the aid of German ships in the Pacific.”
    Other columnists also became instant psychologists. At least three analysts pointed out that the Japanese were suffering from the “Runt’s Complex.” Boake Carter declared the Japanese had “suicidal tendencies.” 8

Strange Doings across the Land
    A CROSS THE WIDTH AND BREADTH of America, millions of people were swamped by rumors and often reacted in strange ways. In Washington’s Tidal Basin an incensed man chopped down four Japanese cherry trees. Bellboys on the roof of the Statler Hotel in Boston used gallons of black paint to hide the huge arrow pointing to the airport.
    In upscale Scarsdale, New York, mothers spent long, tedious hours sitting in parked cars outside of schools, ready to spirit their children home if bombers were to appear. In Norfolk, Virginia, site of the major U.S. naval base, the chief of police had his men round up and jail all fourteen people of Japanese ancestry living in that city.
    In Denison, Texas, the mayor and city council convened in emergency session and were debating buying a machine gun for the police department. An excited man rushed into the chamber and called out that New York City was being bombed. So the mayor proposed that, instead of one machine gun, the city buy two.
    Various local governments organized armed civilian bands to thwart potential saboteurs, and the vigilantes stood watch over likely targets: bridges, railroad trestles, water reservoirs, docks, tunnels, dams, and public buildings. Most of these modern-day Minute Men were armed with a motley collection of weapons: antiquated pistols, shotguns, hunting rifles, even knives. Few had had military training.
    A woman driving across the San Francisco Bay Bridge failed to hear a challenge by a band of armed civilians, one of whom shot at and seriously wounded her.
    On Lake Michigan, sentries shot and killed a duck hunter and wounded his companion.
    The public safety director of Newark, New Jersey, ordered police to board trains and arrest “all suspicious Orientals” and “other possible subversives,” leaving it up to the individual policeman to determine who “looked suspicious” and who did not.
    North Carolina’s governor ordered state police cars to be painted black (presumably to make them